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Landline Holders Increasingly Older, More Affluent
netbuzz writes "More than a quarter of the under-30 crowd has decided you only need one telephone — and it sure as heck does not plug into a wall. The trend towards an all-mobile lifestyle is accelerating, according to a new survey. Besides younger people, lower-income people are also more likely to have cut the cord. And while businesses may be a bit slower on the cell-only uptake, there appears to be little doubt at this point that the traditional landline will be joining rotary dials and party lines as a relic of the telecommunications industry."
"More than a quarter of the under-30 crowd has decided you only need one telephone -- and it sure as heck does not plug into a wall.
I'm in that category - I own a mobile, but unfortunately, here in Australia, you need to rent a landline from the monopoly PSTN provider (Telstra) if you want to have broadband internet (ADSL anyway).
So I have a landline I never use.
God they're filthy (Telstra) - hopefully we'll have a change of Government soon & get rid of the current spineless Prime Minister John Howard - who can't stand up to Telstra.
A single telephone line that serves more than one customer. Most often used in rural areas where it's not economical to install multiple lines. Privacy is nonexistent and I'd assume congestion is high.
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Party lines died out in the 60s, I believe. Back in the day, it was easier for the phone company to run a single pair through an entire block of houses. So if you had a party line, it basically meant that you and your neighbors shared extensions. Everyone had their own telephone number, and the phones would ring differently based on which number was dialed.
Needless to say this meant that every time you wanted to place a call, you'd risk interrupting your neighbors' conversations. It was cheaper to hook residential phones up this way, but obviously most people preferred to pay a bit more for their own line.
A party line is a single telephone line that you share with your neighbors. They were common in rural areas of the U.S. before WWII, probably becuase they were cheaper than dedicated phone lines (remember, back then each line was on a different physical circuit, and calls were switched by human operators).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Interesting. We had a huge windstorm this past winter. I was without power for a week, and had friends who were without for nearly two. During that entire time, my cell phone continued to work perfectly. I used my car to keep the battery charged.
Your experience prompted you to get a landline. Mine has prompted me to buy a generator, though I'm waiting for a few more months when prices will be the lowest (we don't get power outages here in the summer, since it's not hot enough for people to overload circuits with A/C units). If anything, I came out of the experience with a more favorable impression of cell phones, as there's no way I would've been able to keep my old portable phone charged up that long and I couldn't take that out to my car to charge off the engine.
You should be able to call 911 on any landline that's physically connected, even if you don't pay for landline service.
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In the US for voice calls it is billed per time on the air. So both receiver and sender pay, if they are both on mobiles. Basically the way a plan works is you get a certain number of minutes of airtime, generally unlimited at night and during the weekend when the cells are underutilised and a total pool of like 1000 during the week. Any time your phone is in a call, time is deducted from those minutes. Doesn't matter who made it, or what kind of phone is on the other end. Also many companies don't charge airtime for calls that stay on their system. So if you call a person and you are both with the same provider, no minutes are deducted for either party.
The only time you pay overcharges is if you exceed your airtime allotment, or you place a long distance call to a place that isn't included. Most plans include the entire US, so any call in the US is considered local. However they generally don't include international calls so you pay per minute for the call, same as you do with a landline. International calls to you are no different than any other, you don't pay anything other than airtime.
The net effect is that so long as you don't exceed your minutes, there tends to be no extra charges over the monthly plan rate.
No, outside the US, most mobile phones work on a caller-pays basis, just like landlines.
A lot of people prefer it like this - that way, whoever initiates the service usage pays for it, like most services, as opposed to you being at the mercy of whoever decides to call you a lot (tele-marketers, jerks, but I repeat myself, etc).
For example, I'm on a pay-as-you-go plan here in the UK - I certainly don't want people using up my credit if I don't want them to.
I think the US norm of callee-pays originally stemmed from the inability of the billing system/incumbent networks to cope with the other way, due to various limitations (but I could be wrong; it's been a while since I heard that, and my memory may be faulty).
I live in Australia, and was living in New Zealand when they privatised Telecom NZ (before the Telstra sale). I would have thought that the Australian Government would have taken some lessons from the Telecom NZ sale, and kept the copper network. If Telstra, and any competitors, were able to get access to the copper network equally, then competition would have provided enormous benefit to the Aussie household.
In NZ, Telecom (who 'own' the copper network) were saying that it costs them as enormous amount of money to maintain it - when Clear (their major competitor) offered to take this loss making asset off their hands (for a dollar), Telecom refused - I wonder why!
I calculate that around 2012, nearly all folks will be using POTS, if this excerpt from Wikipedia is correct:
"The last solar maximum was in 2001, and on 10 March 2006 NASA researchers announced that the next cycle would be the strongest since the historic maximum in 1958 in which northern lights could be seen as far south as Mexico."
Aren't we just one or two Coronal Mass Ejections from having all our satellites (and cell service among others) go kerflooey?
Verizon will sell you ADSL without a land line in my market (Buffalo, NY) and as far as I know they'll do that anywhere in the country. Probably other providers will too. I've been without a landline for several years.